Why do we fight?

I saw the movie Why We Fight yesterday. For those of you who don't know, it's a whirwind of a documentary about American militarism, focusing on the Military-Industrial Complex and the Iraq War. (warning: spoilers ahead)

The film presents a scathing indictment of the Iraq war. It shows the vengeful, tortured patriotism of a police sergeant whose son was killed in 9/11, who asked a marine to write his son's name on a Baghdad bomb, before later becoming disillusioned with the war and with Bush. It shows the naivete of a doe-eyed Army recruit from working-class America, marching off to war believing that it'll fix his life's problems. It sums up the war's effects in one grisly sequence, showing an Iraqi mortician dragging corpses out of a shattered building, then running through his book of the dead to reveal civilian after civilian. And it shows the dishonesty, sliminess, and corruption of the intellectual apparatus that wrote Bush's Iraq policy, including long-winded self-defeating speeches by such scumbags as Richard Perle and William Kristol (editor of the Weekly Standard).

These hard-hitting, well-founded, broadsides against the war in Iraq really hit home. But the film's biggest success comes when it conjures up the spectre of Dwight Eisenhower, warning the American public of the "Military-Industrial Complex" in his final speech. Ike, this nerdy, ugly, sincere leader on ancient black-and-white television, speaks to us across the ages like the ghost of some long-dead king whispering dire warnings of the time when "someone less knowledgeable about the military" than himself will control America's vast might. It sent a shiver down my spine.

The film's mistakes come not in what it shows, but in what it leaves out. America's numerous past wars are mentioned, with heavy emphasis on Vietnam and Iraq, but one is strangely left out - the war in Afghanistan. In the film's two-hour span, much of which deals with 9/11 and Bush's response, there is not one single mention of Afghanistan. In fact, the film seems so anxious not to mention this war that, after ominously defining the CIA term "blowback," it utterly fails to use the classic example of blowback - American support for the Taliban.

This is intellectually dishonest. Someone watching Why We Fight who had never read the news would think that Iraq was Bush's response to 9/11, and followed immediately after the attacks. The filmmaker seems so anxious to show the evil of American militarism that he intentionally pretends that the one recent war that most Americans perceive to have been both justified and successful didn't even happen. That's not exposition, that's propaganda.

The other big omission is the existence of Islamism. Sure, Iraq is unrelated to 9/11. Sure, Iraq was pointless, stupid, and mismanaged to boot. But apart from and largely unrelated to Iraq, there's a wider struggle underway between the U.S. (some say the West) and radical Islam. This was never covered. Why did 9/11 happen? "Why We Fight" speculates that Bin Laden was pissed off that the U.S. stationed troops in Saudi Arabia in the 1991 Gulf War...but that can hardly be the main reason for Bin Laden's lifelong jihad, or the rage of his legions of supporters.

So why do we fight? The film goes through a lot of reasons - the interests of defense contractors, the desire to open foreign markets, the need for oil, and the desire to preserve American supremacy (I think the latter is the most important). But it never mentions the possibility that there might be someone out there worth fighting against. Is there? I believe there is. Would South Korea be better off today under North Korean control? Or Bosnia shattered and genocidal? Or East Timor drowning in anarchy? Or Kuwait under the control of Saddam Hussein? I don't believe they would.

Our militarists have made some big screw-ups, for which we must hold them accountable and which we must not let happen again. But American war is not always wrong.


PS - What is very wrong is when Dick Cheney breaks the law to get revenge on a member of his own administration who happens not to support Cheney's dishonest propaganda, as happened in the Valerie Plame case. Here's hoping Big Baldie goes down for this.

PPS - In other, largely overlooked news, Hamas has decided to give up suicide bombings! That's like Kobe Bryant giving up the double-pump fake...it's their signature move. Well, they probably just want to save themselves from bankruptcy. But strangely enough, between this and the Gaza pullout, it looks like...well...like progress.